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Friday, April 22, 2011

2011: Festival of the Woman Haters

The Guttmacher Institute's Report, "Laws Affecting Reproductive Health and Rights: Trends in the First Quarter of 2011" gathers the horrifying details in one place. Here is the first paragraph:
To date, legislators have introduced 916 measures related to reproductive health and rights in the 49 legislatures that have convened their regular sessions. (Louisiana’s legislature will not convene until late April.) By the end of March, seven states had enacted 15 new laws on these issues, including provisions that:

• expand the pre-abortion waiting period requirement in South Dakota to make it more onerous than that in any other state, by extending the time from 24 hours to 72 hours and requiring women to obtain counseling from a crisis pregnancy center in the interim;

• expand the abortion counseling requirement in South Dakota to mandate that counseling be provided in-person by the physician who will perform the abortion and that counseling include information published after 1972 on all the risk factors related to abortion complications, even if the data are scientifically flawed;

• require the health departments in Utah and Virginia to develop new regulations governing abortion clinics;

• revise the Utah abortion refusal clause to allow any hospital employee to refuse to “participate in any way” in an abortion;

• limit abortion coverage in all private health plans in Utah, including plans that will be offered in the state’s health exchange; and

• revise the Mississippi sex education law to require all school districts to provide abstinence-only sex education while permitting discussion of contraception only with prior approval from the state.

In addition to these laws, more than 120 other bills have been approved by at least one chamber of the legislature, and some interesting trends are emerging. As a whole, the proposals introduced this year are more hostile to abortion rights than in the past: 56% of the bills introduced so far this year seek to restrict abortion access, compared with 38% last year. Three topics -- insurance coverage of abortion, restriction of abortion after a specific point in gestation and ultrasound requirements -- are topping the agenda in several states. At the same time, legislators are proposing little in the way of proactive initiatives aimed at expanding access to reproductive health–related services; this stands in sharp contrast to recent years when a range of initiatives to promote comprehensive sex education, permit expedited STI treatment for patients’ partners and ensure insurance coverage of contraception were adopted. For the moment, at least, supporters of reproductive health and rights are almost uniformly playing defense at the state level.

This is what Republicans in power do. This is what you voted for or failed to vote against in November, America. Learned your lesson yet?

1 comment:

Allison said...

This is awful, why are we going backwards? It's time for another feminist revolution, led by me!